Video on demand (VOD) technology allows users to select and watch video content over a network. VOD systems allow a user to view a selected program at any time. The user has simply to select the desired movie or television program from his/her user equipment, and wait for the VOD system to play it on the television set.
User equipment encompasses a broad spectrum of delivery devices, such as a set-top-boxes, a computers, a mobile phones or any system that can receive on-demand audio-visual content over a network.
VOD systems generally include a plurality of video servers that deliver video streams to a user output device having a display, such as a television set, in response to the selection of a video program by the user. VOD systems thus make it possible to provide movies on an individual basis to television sets at different locations.
During a delivery session of a specific video program, the user can submit VCR-like functions to the video servers such as play, stop, pause, fast and back forward functions, in order to control the video session.
VOD systems have improved tremendously during recent years. With the improvements in programming selections, picture and sound quality, the number of subscribers to such systems has increased. Therefore, VOD systems appear for assets providers such as advertisers as a particularly interesting medium for delivering their assets, such as advertisements, public service announcements, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content.
A number of advertising solutions have been proposed in the context of television broadcasting. In such solutions, the advertising programs are interleaved with the content in order to be broadcasted at predefined intervals.
Similar solutions are used in VOD systems, but require either that the very content of the video programs stored by the video server include the advertising assets or that tags be inserted therein. As a result, the nature of the asset and the intervals at which the assets are to be streamed are predefined.
Therefore, advertisements are generally delivered indiscriminately to users. Every viewer receives the same advertisements, generally at the beginning of the video program, whether or not they may show an interest in these advertisements.
Other solutions are known that do not modify the content of the video programs but require specific user equipment. These solutions therefore involve further costs and do not apply to the users who are not equipped with specific user equipment.
Another significant disadvantage of existing VOD systems, from the perspective of advertising providers, is that they enable a viewer to skip advertisements. The user may simply activate the forward or fast forward functions to skip advertisements. As a result, the advertisers are less willing to use such solution when they are aware that the users can easily skip the advertisements.